How-to: Use Impala on Amazon EMR

Developers, rejoice: Impala is now available on EMR for testing and evaluation.

Very recently, Amazon Web Services announced support for running Cloudera Impala queries on its Elastic MapReduce (EMR) service. This is very good news for EMR users — as well as for users of other platforms interested in kicking Impala’s tires in a friction-free way. It’s also yet another sign that Impala is rapidly being adopted across the ecosystem as the gold standard for interactive SQL and BI queries on Apache Hadoop.

AWS also helpfully provides a tutorial for launching and querying Impala clusters on EMR. It covers: